After 959 Days, Still No Federal Budget Passed by Senate

Freshman Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) said “there’s no excuse” for Senate Democrats’ failure to pass a budget in nearly three years (959 days). On MSNBC, Manchin, who used to be the governor of West Virginia, explained that he “would have been impeached” for refusing to put together a budget for his state. Senate Democrats don’t want to pass a budget containing all the spending they’ve authorized through individual spending bills, since doing so would further expose their complicity in the Obama administration’s record deficit spending. During the Obama administration, the federal government has run up the largest budget deficits in history; the Obama administration ran up more red ink in just one month (February 2010) than the Bush administration ran up in an entire year (all of 2007).

In the 2008 campaign, Obama promised a “net spending cut,” but as soon as he was elected, he proposed massive spending increases. In 2011 budget proposals, Obama pretended to cut spending while actually increasing spending by tens of billions more than previously planned (his proposals would have further increased both discretionary and entitlement spending by many billions of dollars). Even journalists who voted for him called these proposals dishonest and potentially “disastrous” had they been adopted. Obama made a similarly deceptive sales pitch for his $800 billion stimulus package, citing Congressional Budget Office claims that it would save jobs in the short run, while ignoring the CBO’s own finding that the stimulus will actually shrink the economy over the long run, by exploding the national debt and crowding out private investment. The stimulus ended up destroying jobs even in the short run by wiping out jobs in the export sector, and subsidizing foreign green jobs at the expense of American jobs.